Perhaps _the villas of descending gods_!"

It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the "Night
Thoughts," we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods,
or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count
them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote
the three best:

"Like _blossom'd trees o'erturned by vernal storm_,
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.

* * * * *

"In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:
To the same life none ever twice awoke.
We call the brook the same--the same we think
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow;
Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed
And mingled with the sea."

* * * * *

"The crown of manhood is a winter joy;
An evergreen that stands the northern blast,
And blossoms in the rigor of our fate."

The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions,
is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine emotion_. He sees
virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of
earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in
her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him
dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists--in the emotions of a
man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an
evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in
courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice
and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation
and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.
Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and
secondary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very
eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let
him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The
most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion
and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly
recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes
strong feeling about abstractions--in the interjectional "Humbug!" which
immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite
strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination,
in whom the abstract term